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Month: December 2011

There is a series running on Channel 4 News at the moment where people get the chance to say who or what they think transformed the world in 2011.

Below are two linked videos that were shown as part of the main programme last night. The first is Matt Frei, their U.S. Correspondent, who gives his nominations as “The Occupy Movement” and the late Steve Jobs.

Frei talks about the broken social contract between the people and the Government and Business sectors in capitalist countries. He sees the Occupy Movement as a popular uprising by the 99% who feel more and more disenchanted by the disconnection and frankly selfish and self-seeking actions of the 1%.

But it is the way that the Occupy Movement used social media that he highlights as the key to their importance in changing the world in 2011. That is the reason that his second nomination is a dead man, Steve Jobs. Frei talks about the way that the Occupy protesters used their iPhones and iPads to communicate with each other and use Facebook and Twitter so powerfully to organise and combat the forces that wanted to disperse them. Jobs is seen as the man whose vision in getting technology owned and used so widely gave the people a means to express themselves and most importantly organise.

The second video followed the first in the programme. It was Benjamin Cohen, their Technology Correspondent, talking about the power of social media in 2011 as seen in the role that it played in “The Arab Spring” uprisings, The London Riots and of course The Occupy Movement.

He goes on to discuss the way that Facebook will mature and possibly have its role curtailed by corporate ownership when it goes “public” in 2012 ans also the need for Twitter to become a money making enterprise which may also have spin-off effects.

Whichever way you look at it social media is now a major force in our world and has played a significant part in the events worldwide in 2011 and would be my nomination as the thing that has most changed all our lives this year.

I have just read a really interesting post by Dan Barker in the Huffington Post United Kingdom edition. The post is titled “Decline and Fall: The UK’s Shocking IT Education Record”. It follows the recent Ofsted report on ICT education in schools.

In the post, Barker, a professional software developer, bemoans the fact that U.K. schools have a terrible record when it comes to teaching ICT skills. In a telling phrase he states: “I left school in 2007. In my entire time at secondary school, I had around 30 hours of computer education, concentrated between the ages of 11 and 12. I was not offered computing as an option at either GCSE or A-Level. Looking back now, it’s only because of my learning outside of school that I can do my job today. In that regard, none of my formal education prepared me in any way for the bulk of what I do from day to day”.

This is a young I.T. professional who is only too aware of the place that ICT skills have in the current world economy. He bemoans the fact that he deals with school leavers who do not have basic skills in this key area of the curriculum. He is wiling to attack politicians for their lack of awareness of the importance of these skills in fitting a young person for the digital world that we all now live in.

His final paragraph is perhaps the most concerning for us:

“The good news is that the problem is apparently now moving up the political agenda, with Michael Gove, the education secretary, admitting recently that he thought that computer science needed to be taught more in schools. But with the great credit-funded consumer boom only just spluttering on as we stare into the precipice of what is widely predicted to be another recession, and with a record 1 million 16 to 24 year-olds unemployed, the uncomfortable question is: Is this too little, too late?”

I can only add to this that it is about time that those people who are discussing the curriculum in schools appreciated the need to get to grips with the use of technology in education and the need to allow children to train in the proficient use of this technology so that they have the key skills that are required in order to compete on a global scale in the 21st century.

As I read through this post which was based on the experiences of a 1st grade teacher who had a child, Allie, in her class who is a girl but preferred to dress as a boy, I got to thinking about how important the lessons that took place were on a key area of significance in the lives of those 1st grade children.

The teacher took the time to address the subject of gender but widened this to look at “differences”. Now the children may have learnt some key skill in mathematics or in spelling or writing that day that may have skilled them up for their tests in the future and maybe given them a lifeskill that would prove important for their future welfare. Whatever they learnt in these subjects would be tested at some point and their success or failure would probably come right back at the teacher.

But what about those lessons on “accepting difference”? There would not be a test at the end of the school year and no administrators would be surveying the results and then nervously passing them on to some official so that they could be compared to other school’s results.

Those lessons though may well affect the lives of those children in a huge way. They may be the most important lessons that they will learn in that class that week. As they grow older and have to work out their own personalities and attitudes it may well affect how they relate to other adults, how they bring up their own children and what kind of a world we all get to live in.

In classrooms throughout the world there are lessons such as these happening each school day. They do not appear in grade listings or in sets of data that can be used by politicians and media personalities, they are at the heart of good teaching and effective learning and they change lives.

I found out the other day whilst e-reading “Five Minds For the Future” by Howard Gardner, about two types of learners, spotlight learners who roam around the place and seek information from a multitude of sources and laser learners who concentrate on one particular thing and dig deeper and deeper into it.

This morning I was spotlighting around as I like to do, looking at Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter for something interesting to research, to watch, to read, to look at. I found nothing that really grabbed me so I decided to do a search on Google about most beautiful songs of all time.

I watched a couple of videos and didn’t find them all that moving. I was just about to leave my quest when I discovered a link to a song called “Hurt” by the late, great Johnny Cash.

I looked at this video and the power of it amazed me. Here was a song that had been written by Trent Reznor in a dark moment in his bedroom that was to become the last great song of an iconic performer. The words talked of regret, of ending and of ultimate hurt to the ones that you love. It is a dark song.

Cash though and the filmmakers who shot the video turned the song into a testament of his life and a visual farewell to his followers. It was intensely moving.

I turned from a spotlight learner into a laser learner because I felt that I wanted to know more about the song, its creation and effect. I did a YouTube search and found two more videos about how the video fitted into Cash’s last few months. It made me think of how much material there is on YouTube that can be accessed so easily and provide visual evidence for research.

It proved to me yet again how important visual education is in our digital world and how it must become a key part in the study of the future.

Below are the original “Hurt” video and one of the two videos I found about the song…. watch, feel, think, interpret and understand the real power of video as an educational resource.

At long last YouTube have taken note of the concerns about unlimited access to their total content in schools. They have now come out with “YouTube For Schools”which will have vetted videos which can be accessed safely in schools without any comments or advertisements.

Surely this will answer those who have used the “safety” argument for banning YouTube videos in schools. There is, as the well-made video above shows, so many things that students can get from having the ability to access the wealth of material that is available on YouTube.

This has got to be a step in the right direction of getting wider use of technology into schools. Maybe it might convert some die-hard technology doubting teachers out there that there is something in all this new technology stuff!

I did a YouTube search on “Children talk about using digital technology in school” and found a really interesting link that was not about children as such, or having them talk about their use of different forms of technology (which was the intention of my search) but which was valuable nonetheless.

What I found really interesting about this link was that it actually led me to a specific part of a long video (over an hour) that contained a section where Eric Schmidt (now Executive chairman of Google) talked about the importance of technology.

This idea of starting in a long video at a specific part which relates to a search term was really powerful to me. It made me think about the wider idea of how technology can be used to further learning. It related very much to Schmidt’s point in the video that schools haven’t come to terms with a world of information that is instantly accessible and which can be accessed by technology that is becoming cheaper and more powerful by the year (in an exponential growth).

I would recommend that you access the video at the point of the search term and watch Schmidt as he explains how technology has made the old forms of teaching and learning redundant and how we all need to adapt to a changed world of information that grows by huge amounts on a daily basis (even this blog is adding one tiny segment to today’s input to our well of knowledge!).

I retired from full-time work yesterday. I have left at a time of economic uncertainty and indeed I have been able to take early retirement due to being made redundant because of the Government’s public spending cutbacks.

I should feel somewhat concerned about the future, both my own personal one and the future for the rest of us in an age of economic downturn and the threat of yet another recession.

But I do not feel depressed at all. I have plans to extend my learning using the wonderful online opportunities to learn that are available these days with courses on all subjects from the great centres of education from across the world.

In the wider world picture I have found three young people this week who have given me hope for the future. Here are the links I saved in my Diigo account:

These stories show me that we have some really outstanding talent in our younger generation. Not only are they outstanding in terms of their personal qualities but they have an outlook that wants to help their fellow human beings.

Kyle Thiermann is a 21 year old surfer who has used his surfing connections to help people to understand about the investments that large banks have made that have led to economic exploitation in countries such as Chile. He has been able to get people to change their investment to local,environmentally friendly banks.

Travis Allen made a YouTube video whilst in high school about the need to promote mobile (specifically iPad) learning. The article that I have linked to above shows just how far he has come in promoting his environmentally friendly ideas. He has become a keynote speaker in many conferences and recently attended the Google Zeitgeist Conference where he met other leading “movers and shakers” from all over the world. He has started his own company that promotes paper-free ideas and the advantages of using new technology to promote effective learning in schools and colleges.

Angela Zhang is 17 years old and she’s just been awarded the $100,000 Grand Prize in the Individual category of the Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology. Her project was entitled “Design of Image-guided, Photo-thermal Controlled Drug Releasing Multifunctional Nanosystem for the Treatment of Cancer Stem Cells.”

Here is a High School student who has developed a means for trying to locate and destroy cancer stem cells which could have far-reaching impact on the ability of the medical profession to combat this horrible disease in the future.

These are just three of many many thousands of amazing young people who give me hope for the future. So, as I go out into the unknown that is my retirement I feel that I have a lot to look forward to and, with amazing young people such as Kyle, Travis and Angela , so do the rest of us.